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Economic development

We use lots of items in our daily lives. We use them and then throw them away, or perhaps recycle them when they wear out or get damaged. Then again, some of us prefer to repair for re-use — at a Repair Cafe.

For those who thought that corporate concentration in the food industry couldn’t get tighter, wake up and smell the coffee. The Big Six seed and farm chemical producers are now on the verge of coalescing into three. Amazon may soon be the world’s biggest supermarket.

Fair trade — as opposed to Free Trade — puts farmers, workers, communities and the health of the planet ahead of national trade balances and corporate profits. Listen to the voices of fair traders gathered in Winnipeg for their national convention.

I took off for Hebron on a Sunday morning. Throngs of Israeli soldiers filled the bus station, soldiers on the move, barely more than teenagers, large backpacks and automatic weapons flung over their shoulders, smart phones in their hands.

Imagine an electric-powered fleet of Canada Post vehicles, along with vehicle charging stations at post offices. And postal banking, where loans could be secured for renewable energy installations and home energy retro-fits. Listen up.

It would be difficult to go a day without stainless steel, and that steel would not be stainless without ferrochrome — the end product of chromite mining. In northern Ontario, chromium mining generates controversy.

Picture a landscape buried beneath a sky-high heap of dead plants and animal corpses. This is what Earth’s surface would look like if it weren’t for fungi. Fungi are the biosphere’s recyclers. Human society depends on them absolutely.

Plants that grow from seeds are the foundation of humanity’s food supply. Wheat, barley, oats, corn, potatoes and a dizzying variety of beans and legumes … Conserving these seeds of survival is one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

The slow-food movement has reached the sun-baked, Bolivian altiplano. Here, small-scale producers are making the most of scarce water supplies, ample sun and local expertise to grow food at the top of the world.

In the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains – in northern India – a very energetic woman has declared that seeds should also be free. We caught up with Vandana Shiva at her biodiversity farm north just outside Dehradun.